An Ecocritical Reading of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Series and James Dashner’s The Maze Runner Series.

This dissertation analyses two young adult dystopian series: Collins’s The Hunger Games series (2008-2020) and Dashner’s The Maze Runner series (2009-2020). It does so from an ecocritical perspective. In the introductory chapter, some basic notions about the dystopian genre, the young adult target, and the interdisciplinary field of ecocriticism are considered. Three other chapters, focusing on the novels at issue, follow. The first concerns the representation of space in post-apocalyptic worlds. The second chapter examines the role of technology in altering the biology of humans and animals for control purposes. The third presents an eco-social critique to consumer capitalism. This dissertation tries to demonstrate how the ecological aspect in the two series is not just a mere background or narrative pretext, but it is useful in raising environmental awareness among readers.